Race Memory Data

September 20, 2024

Join artist Henry Tsang, historian Jack (John Kuo Wei) Tchen, and urban geographer Andy Yan as they talk about their approach to the use of data and archives to counter master narratives that have defined and restricted conversations around race and memory. Moderated by Melissa Karmen Lee, CEO of the Chinese Canadian Museum, they also discuss and reflect on Henry Tsang’s recent book, WHITE RIOT: The 1907 Anti-Asian Riots in Vancouver, based on the 360 video walking tour, 360 Riot Walk, which reveals the yet unresolved histories of racialized communities targeted through legislation as well as physical acts of exclusion and violence.

This event was presented by SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement, Emily Carr University of Art + Design, SFU’s City Program, Arsenal Pulp Press, and Massy Books.

Panelists:
Jack (John Kuo Wei) Tchen is a historian, curator, dumpster-diver, and teacher surfacing the disappeared stories othered by systems of power and wealth. Dr. Tchen is the Clement A. Price Professor of Public History & Humanities and Director of the Price Institute on Ethnicity, Cultures, and the Modern Experience at Rutgers University – Newark. His ten-years of work on anti-Asian xenophobia, a two-hour PBS documentary on the “Chinese Exclusion Act,” and exhibition at the New-York Historical Society led him to focus on intersectional history of American eugenics. He has been working with the Munsee Lunaape Elders and honoring enslaved in the region by documenting, sharing, and decolonizing the history of Newark and the larger bioregion. He is the founding director of the A/P/A (Asian/Pacific/American) Studies Program and Institute at New York University, NYU. In 1980, he co-founded the New York Chinatown History project, now the Museum of Chinese in America with Charles Lai.

Andy Yan is the director of The City Program at Simon Fraser University where he is an adjunct professor of Urban Studies. Prior to his SFU appointment, Andy has worked extensively in the non-profit and private urban planning sectors with projects in the metropolitan regions of Vancouver, San Francisco, New York City, Los Angeles and New Orleans. Andy holds a Masters of Urban Planning from the University of California – Los Angeles and a Bachelor of Arts with First Class Honours distinctions in Geography and Political Science from Simon Fraser University.

Henry Tsang is an artist and occasional curator who explores the spatial politics of history, cultural translation, community-building, the mobility of people, capital, values, desires, and food in relationship to place. His recent book, WHITE RIOT: The 1907 Anti-Asian Riots in Vancouver (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2023), explores the conditions leading up to and the impact of a demonstration and parade in Vancouver, Canada, organized by the Asiatic Exclusion League and the ensuing mob attack on the city’s Chinese Canadian and Japanese Canadian communities.

His art projects employ video, photography, interactive media, convivial events, and language, in particular, Chinook Jargon, the North American west coast trade language. Presentations take the form of gallery exhibitions, pop-up street food offerings, 360 video walking tours, curated dinners, ephemeral and permanent public art. Henry is a past recipient of the VIVA Award and is an Associate Dean at Emily Carr University of Art and Design.

Moderator:
Dr. Melissa Karmen Lee (Ph.D) 李林嘉敏 is a visual arts and literature scholar, curator, archivist and storyteller with research interests in public art and social engagement. She currently holds the appointment of Chief Executive Officer (CEO) at the Chinese Canadian Museum, in British Columbia, Vancouver. From 2019-2022, she was the Director of Education and Public Programs at the Vancouver Art Gallery. From 2016-2019 she was the education and public programs curator for Tai Kwun Centre for Heritage and Art. She holds degrees from McGill, Canterbury and Lancaster Universities.

Hello welcome uh everyone delighted that you could uh join us uh this evening for the talk and discussion race memory data uh just wanted to begin by recognizing that we’re on the territories of the musum Squamish and the slow Toth uh people is really important to remember

Uh this uh working out of a post-secondary institution and Arts and Cultural organizations and the important role we have to play in terms of changing the stories that have been told and to continue the work of decolonization and Reconciliation uh my name is am joall I’m director of sfu’s Van City office of

Community engagement we’re proud to be partnering um on this talk with Emily car University of Art and Design SFU City program Arsenal pul press and Massie books to to uh present this we’ve been programming out of the school for contemporary art since they moved down from bernabe Mountain since 2010 we’ve

Done about 800 or so public events um and and they’re predominantly free of charge and we try and maintain the publicness of what a public uh University is around uh ideas of Social and environmental justice Arts culture and community and urban issues and so

You can go on to our website to see all the upcoming uh events besides the ones that were scrolling earlier we’ll have information out next week uh Kum the chairperson of the Squamish Nation will be giving a talk on implementing un drip uh the UN decoration on indigenous

Peoples and uh look forward to uh a number of great conversations that will uh come from that um it’s uh wonderful to be um having uh friends come up here like Henry Henry Chung uh Andy Yan and wonderful to welcome uh Jack Chen uh here and just in terms of being in this

Uh building uh where we are proud members of the downtown side and Chinatown neighborhoods really important we reflect that programming in the in the work that we do it’s my um honored to be um introducing Dr Melissa Carmen Lee She’s a visual arts and literature scholar curator archist and Storyteller

With research interests in public art and social engagement she currently holds the appointment of chief executive officer at the Chinese Canadian Museum uh which is just located a few blocks away on Pender Street I went for the first time just on Friday it’s an absolutely stunning building it’s been

Done with such forethought I know there’s uh members of the provincial government here it’s really a gift to the city in terms of um how to think about our history in a critical way it if you haven’t gone I highly highly encourage you to go so please uh join me

In welcoming Melissa Carmen [Applause] Lee thank you so much am and um so great for you to come by and um looking forward to working more in Partnership together um yes uh the museum chines Canadian Museum we only opened two months ago uh and so we really welcome

All of you to come and so great to see um some um members of the provincial government in the audience um which we’re really thankful for for our opening um but uh enough about me and my museum um why we’re here today is to uh listen to this amazing panel on Race

Memory and data we have three wonderful Scholars um who often also act as curators artists and food writers uh that all kind of think through um history um through the Contemporary um and that kind of transition between both is really interesting part of their research and work so um all three

Panelists will be speaking first for 10 minutes um and introducing a little bit more about their work and then we will sit down and have a very robust discussion I think and afterwards we will welcome questions from the audience uh so as each speaker comes up I will introduce them um our first

Speaker is Henry Jang he is an artist and curator his recent book which is why we’re all here to together today is called White Riot the 1907 anti-asian riots in Vancouver published by Arsenal pulp press this year um and the book explores the conditions and leading up

To and the impact of a demonstration and parade in Vancouver organized by the Asiatic exclusion League that ensued a mob attack on the city’s Chinese Canadian and Japanese Canadian community um past recipient of the Viva award and also an associate Dean at Emily Carr university of Art and Design please join

Me in welcoming [Applause] Henry thanks so much Melissa thanks M joal for hosting this event Julie Aoki and the incredible team here at SFU vanent city office of community engagement my name my name is Henry Jung as Melissa mentioned um I’m going to quickly take you through to um yeah so

This is the title in case you didn’t know and I’m going to be talking about place in relationship to race memory and data uh but first I want to talk about um well I guess related to place the experience that I had as a little kid uh

Flying from Hong Kong where I was born at the age of three and 34 ERS uh to well first Tokyo because we stopped off in Tokyo and that’s the first time my sister and I ever heard another language than cantones being spoken or or or understood that it was different and it

Was um at first funny for us to hear other people speak something else and we didn’t know what was going on and then Landing in Vancouver and the visceral effect of being in a place where you no longer felt you were normal anymore and until then well actually until

Uh we started getting slightly older we realized what we were being identified as Chinese as opposed to just again not knowing that um we were moving from one British colonial space in Hong Kong to another which is British Colombia uh so growing up in Vancouver I’ve been

Very aware of uh that that earlier experience and being different because Vancouver was a white National list Town back then um it was white dominant there were other ethnicities cultures um around but you know vast really U minority of the people living here um and and um and I I thought it

Was really confusing the confusion turned into um an articulation of questioning about my relationship to this particular place and um when I first came across the the the fact that there was this 1907 anti-asian Riot organized by the Asiatic exclusion League I was kind of amazed that I had

Never heard of it until my late 20s it was never introduced in the school system and uh you know subsequently after that I I I tried to find out a bit more also try to find a bit more about uh what it might have been like as a

Chinese person if we had moved here earlier prior to 1968 but actually it would have been really hard because uh um Canada didn’t change the Immigration Act until 1967 to a point system thereby allowing people to um be uh assessed equally no matter where you’re from because there’s such a

Priority on um on Britain and also uh Western Europe and and and places where uh they were people are considered more white than others and and of course the Chinese Exclusion Act uh didn’t allow uh well allowed 44 people over 20 what 24 years uh to come into Canada um and then

Prior to that there was the head tax and prior to that well you know way way prior to that there wasn’t as many restrictions but um yeah it was an interesting kind of path of Discovery uh these are some images from the first um

U not from the riots this is um L what is now known as lwell Park be not be Street grounds Bey Street grounds uh where the parade began for the anti-asian demonstration that ended up at uh City Hall and from there the hysterical inflammatory speeches being relayed from

City Hall uh out to the crowds uh whipped up enough of a frenzy that a mob broke out and attacked Chinatown and then spilled over the following day into to the pal Street area uh where the Riders attacked to the Japanese Canadian community so here’s a colorized

Photograph from U my project 360 Riot walk but before I talk about 360 Riot walk and um and the kinds of alternative histories I suppose stories that weren’t told um commonly especially reported in the in the English language media um there there you know there was this

Other project that I worked on um but these questions uh of of not just what happened here that that might have affected me and my family if we had been here earlier and definitely affected those who were here um at I also was wondering how this could be interpreted as an art project

As an artist um um I have a research-based practice uh um there certain situations uh conditions political or social or cultural that I find fascinating enough to try to explore and then find a way to um um kind of express it through uh an artistic lens and and something like

This um you know the the white nationalist history of of this very place um and connected to other white nationalist histories in in um Northern America and South America um this the first iteration of this particular topic of the 1907 anti-asian rights uh was a food project uh that was called Riot

Food here imagining um it it took the form of a popup food offering uh at four of those locations along the parade demonstration and the riots from from 1907 and basically asking what would you have eaten as an angry white man just before you went out to attack the

Chinese or the Japanese in their homes and what would you have eaten as Chinese or Japanese person before the angry white man came over to attack you what would you have eaten as a South Asian who got beat up in oops I’m going the wrong way got beat up in Bellingham 3

Days prior to the riot uh Force marched to the Border only allowed in because you’re a British subject ended up in Vancouver just in time to watch this other Riot that wasn’t aimed at you but by extension you would be eventually included and lumped into in into and um

What would you have eaten uh um as you watch The Angry White Man attack the Asians on your land so food from five different cultural perspectives um there’s indigenous there was Chinese Japanese um white specifically English with a roast beef and Yorkshire pudding and um also um uh

Punjabi and that was actually restaged last week uh at the Massie Art Center Massie books is outside with the books of white Riot please buy a copy little plug U and here’s a photograph of uh myself at a what looks like a makeshift table from the detritus

After a riot it was carefully crafted and there’s Chris Barn Holden a local Chef who interpreted um the research that I had done trying to figure out what people might have been eating around 1907 and he gave it a contemporary twist um there’s Chris and myself outside what used to be Old

Market Hall uh right next to the Carnegie Center downtown and uh there there was a overhead shot uh really exciting conversations happened out of that one and the third stop was um in Chinatown outside of the um classical Garden sunen Chinese class classical Garden um quite a crowd that we drew

Over there and this is the last stop at Oppenheimer Park um and that’s where the riots ended uh more or less ended U nearby and ironically the mayor of Vancouver Alexander bethon who was one of the original signing members of the Asiatic exclusion League had to come out

And appease the angry Japanese men who gathered to um discuss uh their demands for apology and uh reparations so um that project led to 360 Riot walk because the project began with a walking tour um of of the riots that was led by Michael Barn Holden who is a local poet

And um who’s who’s walking towards about the 1907 rides had been happening for quite some time and it was during this walk that I first thought oh wouldn’t it be great if we did a I created a 360 Riot walks so we don’t have to wait for

Michael to do one every once in a while uh and as an embodied experience of the neighborhood but also with archival photographs integrated and embedded within the 360 images that would respond to your movement as you looked around the neighborhood and so here’s some guided tours that happened uh with um

People with these tablets you can look it up on your phone 360 rotw walk.com for the last few few Summers it launched at actually the the very first tour guided tour was at the pal stre Festival in 2019 I love this picture because there’s people looking like they’re staring at a brick

Wall and and this project uh uh turned into a book because I well I was kind of worried that something on the Internet wouldn’t last too long that’s sort of what eventually happens I had so many problems with Apple operating systems you know they keep on changing things

And all of a sudden things don’t work anymore so yeah with that experience as well um I thought well okay U it’d be great to have the script available because this project online isn’t going to last forever and and here’s the script uh and and it’s just in the

English only because there’s actually four different languages that you can experience uh for the for the walking tour the others being Cantonese Japanese and Punjabi um so yeah this this book was this opportunity to expand on contextualize and um place within a contemporary context uh some of the

Issues that were explored in in the book and in the book um in in the project uh 360 right walk with the addition of seven um contributing writers of whom one of one of whom is Andy here tonight um there’s 13 stops on the tour um and

I’ve got my slides all out of order here’s Michael uh Barn Hol in in red leading the the um the riot food here um um walking tour that launched all the food popup um experiences in the following weekends and I’m going to probably have to cut this short soon

I’ve got short videos of like a little kind of simulation of um how you might experience your tablet as you look around the neighborhood oh my goodness um and you can zoom in and out of the imagery um yeah so these archival images are embedded into the landscape uh some

Of these documents um are put up almost like like posters because that was the kind of uh uh social political and in this case like physical environment that people had to um um navigate and negotiate through and and survive if you were being targeted as undesirable um or um um you know a

Threat right um and one of the challenges we Face trying to figure out where to um what what the root of the tour would be uh was to well first of all we decided not to start off at the very beginning of the tour because downtown to uh Main

And Hastings and then to Chinatown and then to P Street was just too far so we started actually in Gast Town um and then from there we went to um Old Market Hall City Hall but after City Hall the the mob went down Market alley and Market alley is right behind um well

Sort of next to the Carnegie there’s this this um this alley that kind of ends there’s a t-shaped alley back there but it looks like this right and and so Michael Barn Holden and I we WR co-wrote the script together we we we discussed for weeks you know whether or not we

Should include Market alley as part of the tour because it’s a bit of a challenging space it’s challenging because if you has anyone been down Market alley recently yeah you have yeah well you know what it’s like right it’s you’re you’re kind of encroaching on other people’s space because there are people

Hanging out there’s also people shooting up and um it’s not the same vibrant business community that it was in 1907 when he had restaurants and laundries and opium factories uh you know it was it was like a really important part of Vancouver although very Chinese uh but

You know it it’s challenging plus you have to be careful not to step on syringes and stuff like that so we decided to avoid that and go down Pender and I still feel to this very day that it’s a Mist it’s not really missed opportunity but it’s inaccurate right so

That still bothers me about that but it was a important decision to make um I still stand behind it but based on contemporary conditions of the humanitarian crisis that is happening right outside on the streets in this area um so yeah um another location that

We um um found kind of also shocking in a different way almost in the opposite way way is Shanghai alley and this is the power of design to destroy any resemblance of a form of community it is so sterile there there’s like if you walk down there it you feel alienated uh

Because it’s it’s so bare and there’s no life there and this was the center of Chinatown this was bustling it would have been full of energy full of Sounds full of smells full of everything but not anymore has anybody been down there recently really why because you don’t live in the

Senior’s home right I mean that’s the only reason people go in and out of there besides finding a place to take a nap or again maybe shoot up nearby but it’s really sad um oh I got a simulation of that space oops okay I’m going to

Skip these too bad I should have run these while I was talking um you can find all the stuff online of the simulations online uh 360 Riot walk um and then the third stop third yeah fourth I’m bad counting is Oppenheimer Park formerly known as the Bey Street

Grounds and this is a really important historic site when indigenous people were kicked out of their uh re dislocated from their homes in Stanley Park they went here and uh and camped out there for a while this is a place where uh it was the home of the isahi baseball team for the

Japanese Canadian community and this also known as Kamal which is big big leaf maple trees and um this was a seasonal campsite so that’s why the indigenous folks were very familiar with this particular place and interestingly enough this is the place where the city of Vancouver designated for protests for the city uh

As a way to contain protests and also keep protests away from other more respectable parts of the city so and a lot of Labor protests have happened here and so forth uh so you know as many people now are aware of Oppenheimer park has been um a place of other um

Encampments uh temporary encampments tent cities and indicative of the homelessness issue that we’ve been been facing as a city not just in the last while but it goes back to the found founding of the city and and and before because the history of um squatters also

Um is part of of the fabric of this place and it’s really interesting also looking at um the Oppenheimer Oppenheimer Park and you notice there was photographs of the tent cities um sorry images of the the 10th City in the picture because the photographs were taken in taken in

2019 um and then also William lion McKenzie King uh he was a junior Minister who was brought in to um conduct the Royal commission um um looking at the riots and dealing with the negotiations for uh compensation for all the damages for the Japanese and the

Chinese and it was in some of the receipts that he received uh that he first came across the Opium factories and he took that information information back to Ottawa and proposed and for the first time ever a junior Minister got a bill passed in Parliament that became Canada’s first everever Drug anti-drug

Law the Opium act so um you know what happened in 1907 had all these other ramifications um not just in in in terms of drugs um homelessness and and um other other things but also for um the anti-immigration movement which was actually very successful uccessful after this because Japanese immigration was curtailed

Significantly The Continuous Journey act against South Asians from India was passed shortly after that the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1923 was passed again well a little bit later um Etc so all this information somehow is hopefully embedded in this art project uh visually but also orally

And is made available in the book so yeah thank you very much [Applause] thank you so much Henry next we have andyan who is the director of the city program and associate professor at SFU um and uh he of course is well known on many levels in urban planning and

Urban studies um and uh has worked all over North America um and uh holds um a masters of urban planning from UCLA and um also is a graduate of SFU um please welcome Andy um thank you so much Melissa and I am afraid of touching Max Max generally

Dislike me and I just like Max but but thank you so much and that really here that I’m here to really talk about perhaps uh my chapter in U in in in in the book that uh Henry invited me to um to to write about really um if you

Will the role of say of what of what the numbers were look like and I think that that’s really a role through which I’m known to do in the city and really part of that kind of conversation and that in that discussion of data and race and memory it’s actually one

Through which on the surface seems to be fairly straightforward and that very much when we look at say the sizes of the communities in in the city of Vancouver at the time unfortunately we 1907 for the 1907 race rights just lies between censuses from the 1901 to 1911

That uh I looked really predominantly at the 1911 census to kind of really give a sense of what kind of community uh existed in at that time as as really I think that this really talks to really um a community through which I think represents a a way of knowing a

Community is through census information and from that perspective it’s re it’s actually fairly straightforward you find that 177% that well actually 3.7% of the population of the city of Vancouver was Chinese that 2.1% was uh Japanese and 4% was Hindu and I think that this begins this I think discussion

About really how censuses aren’t only technical reports or technical documents but they’re also social ones and that as such it’s ones that really begin to tell you how Notions of community of nationhood of ethnicity of race I think really occur and in one way this kind of

Presentation I think kind of ends here we’re done that’s it but I think that it wouldn’t that uh it wouldn’t uh that when Henry invited me to write uh this entry it was I think uh 1,500 words you wanted and then I gave you something

Like 3,500 words in terms of that and as such it really I think begins to take on the opportunity and what is that opportunity when we kind of just not only look at these numbers look at census numbers but we actually really then offer really a time machine and

That in this kind of lack of a time machine as not all of us have a modified 1981 DeLorean dmc2 that really it’s an opportunity to then go 88 mil or 1242 km an hour to actually begin to look at what actually are the values and the

Ideas behind the census and how much that tells you about the Canada that was and per and also the Canada that is but perhaps more importantly the Canada that could be and as such that we don’t have necessarily this type of time machine but we very much have these and that as

Such we can look through historic I think data sets in terms of giving us an understanding of time and how values change and yet also I think give us a grounding towards where our community is changing and how it’s changing because you move from even this perspective you

See actually the development of new ways of understanding our past that uh there’s a new infrastructure in towards understanding the digitization of data and as a means to have a understanding of where our country has gone and as such this is U moving from just a a an

An an old set of census documents there’s been a digitization movement for which was critical towards that type of understanding of change and I think that an understand that change it’s it’s critical towards understanding how things ideas change around things as simple as space that you take the idea

Of Vancouver and Vancouver in 2023 and that this is very much the Vancouver in oops 2023 and that one thinks about this as the boundaries of the city of Vancouver but yet when we go back to what was Vancouver in 1911 it actually moves from this understanding of

Vancouver into this that this actually is the Vancouver we’re talking about that when we talk about the city of Vancouver these are actually the boundaries of that City we are talking about and that those other parts of the city are actually counted as other communities and other boundaries that we

See the how the city of Vancouver moves from one city that we know today but was actually well back in 19 1911 five distinct separate entities and begin to understand that space changes understandings of place changes and I think from understanding the how Place changes we also then to understand the

Data about the data and very much how instructions about how data is collected and how that shapes how those numbers are are are are reported that you find out that very much it is patrilineal that ideas of gender come into play that your race or tribal Origins isos is

Usually at least according to this instruction to the in numer traced through the father but yet at the same time it changes for those who are indigenous and how that how those numbers are also then collected in towards um the ideas of a a matrilineal uh identities and yet also about race in

How you see uh mixed ethnicity that it didn’t exist that you had to be another that you could not be biracial you could not identify yourself as one of being multiple cultures but yet you had to pick one and as such based upon the gend based upon gender and I think that you

Move forward in towards how at this base level of the data behind the data that it gets to be what’s reported and how what gets reported are 23 separate identities and ideas of culture and ethnicity and race that it is a mix of nationality of ethnicity religion and

Geography that we see the complexities of how ideas of race and ethnicity change over time and that this is how the one idea of those factors are reported out in 1911 and I think it’s also not only about what gets reported but how data is collected and it’s very

Much how that data is collected that these are the original um enumeration records that are now available on the internet through which you can go and find individual records and yet I think from those individual records you then bring in some uh interesting questions uh towards things that aren’t reported

In the official reports uh one in particular that I’m curious about really goes into really how the role and the changing ideas of Chinese Canadians that we see Chinese Canadians beginning to emerge that the idea that you could be both Chinese and Canadian starts beginning to emerge in this

Records and then also I think the role of other social economic factors things like religion the role of of how identifying yourself as Canadian also is related towards factors like religion and how that plays in towards one’s identity but then one also begins to understand that enumerators were paid 5

Cents per sheet and that really that sheet not only um comes through certain I think um diligences that um some collectors were diligent as they went record by record and some perhaps were a little more loose in towards how they collected Census records that then it

Begins to ask whether you look at how much Census records start reflecting the respondents the census the government of Canada or that of Henry Thompson who in this case was the enumerator who was responsible for this particular sheet and how you how you I think factor that in towards understanding data about a

Community but I think within that element it’s also understanding how much that there are very there is this question of the the local and global politics behind so social census data collection that with the 1911 census there is actually this resistance within the Chinese Canadian community that

There is actually this census strike if you will where this Chinese Community back in 1911 in Chinatown had refused to respond to their sens uh to their census enumerators that they had similarily I I think had um had had had just outright said we’re not going to we’re not going

To respond to you and that really how the consensus um the census the census um numerators and the and the officials back then had also responded to actually then reach out to really the role of the of the of The Counselor General and but then I think it goes back towards a

Sense of fear a sense of concern that how this is the emergence of data as surveillance as um the concern turns around why chinesee can the Chinese population back in 1911 didn’t want to respond to the census was upon the re the the the the suspicions around the McKenzie uh commission which occurred

After the after the riots that they would be this Roundup and mass deportation of the Chinese population back then but I think that what you’ll also see in towards the global politics is then the appeal to the celor general of China and I think that this actually has a deep relationship towards the

Politics of today you start seeing the transnational elements of of of communities of the kind of marginalization of the Chinese community in 1911 through which SE a representative and while being barred from voting being barred from being elected office that that instead you see the roles of the Cel general of China

Being the middle person the facilitator in these conflicts within the community and one through which actually occurs on several instances throughout to 20th century through which uh we can talk about later and then of course and I think that this is something that comes in today that if you begin to understand

The transnational politics of today why a figure like The Counselor General of China in Vancouver has a role in contemporary politics that these are the roots of that role and then of course the other side are IRA Housewives who refuse to answer their census in South

Vancouver and how much that comes into I think the idea of the census as a social document that there are I think these elements through which um the the these these these documents have this idea of participation and non-participation and then really it’s from these ideas of

Censuses as social documents you go in and have an opportunity to rethink British Columbia and in a way not only rethinking British Columbia but expanding British Colombian history and from that perspective it’s an understanding that when we talk about the Chinese Canadian population in 1911 that yes indeed 18% of the population in

Of the Chinese Canadian population was concentrated in e in Vancouver and another 18% in Victoria but yet at the same time over 50% of the population was throughout the entire Province and how do we expand that idea of memory as a provincial memory that I think lies into

I think an a a challenge an opportunity to celebrate that that province that that idea of a multi of a multicultural multiethnic Province wasn’t something that occurred recently but has been around British Columbia for a very long time and we can also similarly see this in terms of communities in British

Columbia that were over 10% Chinese we actually find that in places like in places like Newcastle which small um around around the nyal that it was actually 15% Chinese and that a place like Victoria was similarily 11% of Chinese and really how that changes in terms of what communities how the

Dynamics of those communities uh were and also the province that has yet to come from this from this data set and then really I think it’s going in towards understanding how censuses have changed over time and their role in both oppression and empowerment that there is

I think this idea of racial formation in terms of how categories are created inhabited transformed and destroyed in this uh in this book by Michael Omi and Howard manette but yet at the same time it’s also how these systems can be used to empower power communities that can be

Used to really ensure that there is an accountability towards acts of historic and systemic racism and I think that it’s really then going back to the idea of not only the measures of the past but then what is it mean today as we talk about the city of Vancouver using the

2021 boundaries of the city of Vancouver and we find that it is very much a a population that’s 25% Chinese that’s 2% Japanese and yet also about uh 5% South Asian and really how that comes in towards how that Community has changed and that from an original kind of 23

Categories uh of of of of Origins that one identified themselves in 1911 it moves to 250 by 2021 and how that talks about an expanded memory and expanded Canada and I think that it’s also from that perspective not only taking I think the ideas of 1911 but then what happens

When we see rhetoric well come in Fairly recently that one from something from 30 years ago that when you come in and talk about how uh Vancouver becomes Asia town that you know this declaration in 1996 from Vancouver magazine uh comes into these types of I think media

Representations and yet also how things change and how by in 2021 uh Vancouver is the most Asian city in Canada and the United States in North America that you’ll find that 40% of Metro vancouverites have roots in Asia and yet the questions are what are what are

Those kinds of roots and what are those kinds of stories uh compared to other communities throughout Canada and the United States um I think the kind of thing that you can also use this chart to do is actually understand where the great Asian food Asian restaurants are

In in North America but then I think that from that element of the communities that we are and are have yet to be I think that there are there’s a very serious element of how seses and data can be used to deal with systemic uh racism and and and Legacies of the

Past as I think that this initiative by the British Colombian government in terms of addressing systemic racism is I think part of how we move from how we used to think of ourselves and how we used to to measure race into from a from really an instrument of control and

Oppression in towards a tool of empowerment and information and that as this tool of empowerment and information we ensure that Vancouver and hope don’t become two separate destinations and that it’s really a future through which roads we’re not where we’re going we’re not going to need any roads thank you [Applause]

Thank you so much Andy and um special Round of Applause for his first appearance since being the newly tenured Andy and professor at [Applause] SFU well deserved um and our next speaker is um Professor Jack Chan he is uh the Clement a price professor of public history and Humanities and

Director of The Price Institute on ethnicity cultures and the modern experience at Ruckers University New York uh he has had uh 10 years of research on anti-asian xenophobia two-hour documentary on the Chinese Exclusion Act by PBS um exhibition of the New York Historical Society which led him to focus on the

Intersectionality history ofer American Eugenics he has been currently working with the m lanap elders and honoring enslaved in the region by documenting sharing and decolonizing the history of New York and the larger bio region founding director of the APA studies program and Institute at NYU and in 1980 co-founded the New York Chinatown

History project which is now the Museum of Chinese in America with Charles Li uh thank you okay well it’s thank you uh for thank you for that introduction um thank you so much uh am for this incredible space and the commitment that uh your program has uh to uh engagement

In a in a serious way um I wish I was nearby to attend the lean Simpson event that’s coming up um thank you Andy Andy is a longtime friend um Andy and I go back a long ways but mainly what we do is we go to restaurants and we talk at

Restaurants so food figures into our relationship as well um my new friend Henry thank you so much for this incredible work you’ve done it was a privilege to write a little blurb on the back of the book and that gained me the opportunity to actually come here and

Speak to you so I really appreciate that thank you Melissa congratulations on this incredible space and also I just wanted to say hello to really a new friend a relatively new friend uh who’s a amazing artist installation artist Kim hung who’s also here in the audience so

It’s really a pleasure to have her here as well um I thought uh it might be good to kind of back up and talk a little bit about some of the what Raymond Williams talked about the structures of feelings um that are in play here and that of

Course are not strictly about Chinese or or Asians or anti- asianism but have to do with larger Dynamics really of loss and how modernity Works Western modernity Colonial modernity we can call it many things so I just want to kind of throw it a few kind of key Concepts that

Might be helpful in our kind of unpacking what’s happened and what is happening now and I think the key thing is that as a historian I’m not so much interested in reconstructing what happened it’s not like there’s some linear simple linear progression but in fact what is happening now and how we’re

Understanding that history either in a critical way or as an accepting kind of inevitability is really the key to what we do now how we act because I believe we’re in a very dangerous moment I spent a lot of my years really looking at the phenomenon of how Chinatown emerges the

Phenomenon of yellow Peril as it switches from one group to another in North America and Europe and in the colonial context and it’s clear that there are Cycles and it’s clear that there are patterns that come back and I think we’re at a particularly dangerous moment now not

Only because of the internal divisions within well United States uh I live in New York I live in Brooklyn and on a daily basis we’re now rehearsing uh what’s going to happen in the upcoming presidential elections but the stakes are particularly high now because climate change and global

Warming which fewer and fewer of us are able to deny and to kind of ignore uh the stakes are very high because of the way Biden has committed to that but at the same time Biden has also and I’m I voted for Biden he’s also unfortunately I think continued some of

The policies that were enacted by uh the president who will not be named who existed before him and we’re heading I believe as a historian looking at the patterns into another Code War and it’s it’s very clear to see that and the object of that code war is not so

Much Russia but it’s actually China and it seems ludicrous to be heading into a cold war in which you have the United States which is claiming to be the greenest uh the greenest country and investing the most in the green economy globally and China which is also

Investing heavily even more so of the United States into a green world and it’s not to say that either country is right or wrong both countries have their deep flaws but it seems ludicrous to be having a cold war waged against who’s going to be more green when in fact that

Code War itself is going to prove to be the downfall of the possibility of actually you know arriving at something that would be close to uh reducing uh the the carbons that we’re using in our economy so I kind of want to go back and forth here and really

Here the point is that um historians tend we tend to think of historians as kind of starting with the past and then going to the present and that there’s a linear kind of progression of somehow how that happens but I think enough of us are aware that history and the

Historical imagination is not a linear process but in fact it’s closer to the way Mikel Baken talked about chronotopes chronotopes for example the novel is a chronotope the creation of a novel and going backwards in time and wordss in time is part of that kind of linking the

Different patterns that may exist that may only be in the imagination of the novelist or in the case of Henry’s talking about the census um how does the census and the changes of the census actually represent a chronotope of how time changes and categories change um and with Henry’s juxtoposition in the

360 view the Panorama you also see that Jos of how the present T cities in the Park are just opposed against the anti-chinese right so we’re our lives and the way our imaginations and the way we understand things are constantly in chronotopic relationship it’s not about some simple relationship with the past

Determining the present and the present determining the future so I thought it’d be good to maybe talk about that both as uh the liberating potential of the historical imagination but the potential of um giving in too much to the structure of feelings that uh make it difficult for

Us to actually take the step and actually begin to understand history and work through the difficulties and actually come at a different place um that has a liberating potential that hopefully histo a historical understanding and historical imagination can have so um I’ve you know spent a lot of years doing different

Kinds of projects and forming different organizations I should just say that I certainly agree with the kind of feminist Maxim that the personal is political I would just as a historian as a public historian I would say of course the personal is also historical and that um that so much of

The historical is not as a public practitioner it’s not so much acknowledging what the official historians say it’s actually understanding the the powerful role of memory and the powerful role of what meanings we make from the memory it’s not strictly the domain of an academic it

Should be something that is part of a general public and popular practice so um I’ll just say that the title loss modernity and horror is really kind of a working through further along of some of the work I’ve done in the past um I won’t necessarily go into that but I’ve

Spent many years working on issues of Chinese Exclusion history of Chinese Laundry workers the the the experiences of people who have been erased and communities that have been erased or communities that have been represented as always this other the inscrutable mysterious other or the potential of engaging with otherness in a way that

Actually opens up our imaginations of understanding how to actually cross over borders and move beyond the very simplistic binaries of Americans being all good or bad chineses being all good or bad or for that matter Canadians being all good or bad right um that

Tends to kind of be a you know in the US context oh Canadians you know we have a certain you know thought thought you know the Canadians are are were humorous and comedians come from and we tend not to think of Canadians as being part of

That b binary um but in fact I think the construction of all cultures tend to be as a binary of who the other is often times in a dangerous in in infringing binary um so I’ve spent a lot of time doing work on chinatowns trying to reconstruct the history of chinatowns

And why they emerged a lot of what I ended up with is thinking that it’s not like chinatowns emerg because Chinese are clannish but there’s a historical context for that and the historical context really has to engage with how the world becomes globalized at an earlier Point especially linked to

Colonialism and to the China trade itself and the China trade goes Global but New York in the history of the new nation the U new us nation becomes the first major port that is venturing into China and actually developing the China trade and growing the wealth of the of

New York rebuilding the wealth of a city that had been devastated by the British um and the and the re Revolutionary War and then becoming a global power and that kind of pattern that emerges out of New York expands and extends to so many other parts of the world now so I wanted

To kind of emphasize that um the question of that of the time of 1784 when the Empress of China leaves the port of New York and goes towards China uh to try to get to China at a point that it can begin to trade whatever Goods it had to uh to get

Things that uh gentle men and gentle women the founding fathers and mothers wanted on their uh dining tables from porcelain General George Washington wanted always the latest of porcelain sets even in the height of the American Revolution so how did that question of what did China want than drive so much

Of what we’re facing today so here I made the leap from looking at Asian-American studies Chinese American studies chinat towns yellow Peril where I spent a lot of my work my time doing that work Chinese Exclusion looking more and more at the intersectional nature of these phenomenon which includes Eugenics

American Eugenics New York City was the center of eugenics uh for a good part of the teens and 20s and 30s going to the 30s in global Dynamics um and we can talk about all these things and kind of going over this all really quickly but then how does

That also lead to how does that go further back in terms of the dispossession of indigenous people the enslavement of Africans and the ways in which massive extreme extractivism actually happen now we tend to think of extractivism as something maybe that you all are thinking about in terms of

Vancouver or British Columbia or the Pacific Northwest as United States tends to think of that that you know this larger region but it from my point of view as a historian it really begins uh maybe with Henry hunson Henry Hudson you know kind of discovering um and and beginning his

Trading Post in 1609 or we can go back to uh verzano JPI verzano who enters uh the ismos that now bears the name of the verono bridge in 1524 we can keep on going back but the patterns are very clear in terms of how what is indigenous Scholars will say settler

Colonialism actually operated and it’s not simply the dispossession of indigenous people or the enslavement of Africans to work that land to maximize wealth and and power and profit but the extreme extractivism part is the one is the area that I’ve really been really struggling to work on because of the

Climate crisis that we’re now in so for us to understand how history then also is not simply about oh you know is it industrialization and are not recycling enough plastic bottles that that’s why we’re in the mess we’re in but I think more importantly it’s important to understand how the way settler

Colonialism operated and how extractivism Mass massive extractivism was linked to it because it’s really an attit about once you own a parcel of property in your private domain it takes it away from the commons and a sense that we all have to share the water the

Soil the crops that are growing on the soil the berries that are growing on bushes freely we have to begin to privatize that and once you own that parcel you can extract it to your heart’s Delight because that land is yours and you don’t have to worry or

Think about the quality of the air the quality of the water and the quality quality of the soil so that kind of thinking which is deeply entrenched in a kind of colonial attitude that also impacts the way the British then basically colonized Ireland for example by massively extracting the oak trees in

In Ireland that really Ena the British to defeat the Irish how can we understand those patterns as they entered into the United States into the colonies and how did the United States once it had its revolution continue that tradition in a way that is really why

We’re in the mess that we’re in right now so let me just show you really four quick slides um that will kind of look at this pattern and it’s really about how how um contemporary culture is still unresolved about how to how to handle its relationship to nature

But its relationship to Nature is also indicative of a lot of yellow Peril kind of fears and this is just one slice making some quick connections to how settler colonialism also impacts and also has constituted yellow parilis itself so I don’t know how many of you actually seen this film um Annihilation

It’s it um Natalie Portman as you can see in the center is is one of the lead Stars but it really shows a group of four or five women who enter into this weird Zone how many of you have seen this film I’m just curious if any okay a

Few of you it wasn’t a big film but I think it’s actually an important film and some people would maybe describe it as a horror film and I think it is it’s actually a very powerful film so I encourage you to kind of look on Netflix

And and see if you can find it but they enter into this weird Zone in which there’s a shimmering effect on a parcel of land and before you know it they’re finding as this group of women multi-racial entering into the Zone they start seeing nature as shimmering and transforming so

They’re are giant crocodiles for example and the plants are growing on into human forms it’s really kind of uh uncanny and uh fascinating because they’re they’re feminist heroins Multicultural feminist heroins going into nature and encountering this uh danger that they are now in charge of protecting and kind

Of winning U winning um uh kind of winning victory over or at the risk of the entire region in the entire civilization uh modernity itself being threatened uh in terms of any possible future Redemption and part of it this is kind of a blurry image but part of it is that

You start seeing this morphing of nature in which on the one hand there’s a super uh disintegration so the this weird kind of deer-like gazelle like creature on the left they’re twins but the one on the left is degenerating and dying and the one on the right is like healthy and

Flourishing so there’s a doubling so much of the way nature is operating and in fact nature is exploding but at the same time it’s more in and its prior forms that we tend to take for granted are kind of Disappearing so it’s like nature on steroids and in some ways it

Reinforces the kind of Puritan fear of the forest of the nature itself we can talk more about this it’s a deeper pattern but I just want to kind of present this and how it also resonates very deeply with an odor pattern of how fear and anxiety was expressed um these

Images are are probably well known if you know anything about Asian-American or Chinese American history these are kind of out of wasp uh the WASP uh publication which was a weekly coming out of San Francisco during the height of the anti-chinese movement and here you see uh railroad monopolies with um

Uh with with Crocker um Charles Crocker and and uh Stamford of Stanford University Fame uh in the eyes of this octopus and the octopus of course is kind of controlling and overwhelming the ways in which um really white um labor but also some Chinese labor were sustaining themselves so the minor uh is

Being overwhelmed um you know so you see and they’re dying in the graveyard so a certain way of life that wasn’t hadn’t established itself too long is now being taken over by their barro Monopoly okay so this is a very powerful kind of notion of a new technology coming in and

Over whelming the way life had been so there’s a dramatic sense of loss and there’s a deep pattern of these kinds of political cartoons so what’s the emotional resonance when you actually get this newspaper and you look at a political image like this it’s not simply an analytical kind of um reaction

But the successful political cartoon the visual cartoon or one silent films and moving pictures and talking F films start taking in effect or record players there’s an emotion visceral impact that it has so we enter into the realm of how culture operates not simply intellectual not simply rational but how culture actually

Operates on our bodies themselves our feelings and how does that move us to feel certain kinds of ways or to tilt us in a certain kind of Direction so this kind of fear of loss is really quite powerful it’s comparable to something maybe that we would think

About today in in terms of how many white middle class people feel totally threatened um by um the changes that are happening in terms of immigration policies in terms of feelings of uh well black lives matter does that mean White lives don’t matter you know so all these

Questions of how a traditional kind of way in which white nationalism and white culture has operated and those assumptions are being dramatically eroded by demographics by the way China has become so powerful so quickly those changes are deeply threatening but also evoke a feeling of loss and

Threat and how do they operate and then you see here the Chinese octopus right so you see a very effective and easy way in which the emotions of fear and loss can get transferred to uh personified a personified group so in the same way that perhaps um Natalie Portman is kind

Of representing the threat that the shimmering nature on steroids is impacting all women and therefore through women all civilization uh kind of civilization that’s protect that they’re trying to protect um you have the same issue here where the CH the China man is the octopus who’s taking

Over all these occupations and doing all these things and they’re forcing these poor white boys out of work and they’re being sent off by the policemen to the Reformatory and the industrial Reformatory in the background now it’s not a good history because you know that Industries begin to kind of

Usurp and take over you know um all Industries so it’s but often times in other political cartoons you can see that the China man actually becomes the machine itself and in some ways there’s a lot of residents today about AI surveillance um kind of the way in which

The Oriental has become the master of chips and Automation and how therefore that’s so dangerous to have uh China or or even Taiwan or Japan with the anti-japanese feelings that those of us old enough to remember that that kind of phenomena uh cannot have control it cannot be in their control um

There’s always a switch from what the good Asian would be versus the bad Asian and the bad Asian can switch very quickly as we’re witnessing now so I just wanted to kind of emphasize really this question of how loss is really in many ways wired into modernity itself uh

Modernity is something that uh different people have talked about the acids of modernity which what appears to be modern and the most Cutting Edge is constantly melting and constantly becoming uh ethereal uh and therefore a new form is taking over we’re living in such a moment now and the

Anxieties and the sense of loss and the fear that is left in that process then opens itself up to either moments of transformation and Liberation to try to uh kind of resolve some of these issues to try to think ahead or actually to revert to the patterns of

Xenophobia scapegoat ISM uh kind of taking it out on the Chinese octopus when in fact uh there are larger forces at play as well so let me just end here because this is just meant to kind of play with these questions of how change and and place operate and this is where

Ven’s idea of chronotope is actually useful but there’ll be other questions that I think will come up in the discussion that might be also helpful as a way for us to understand and work through these questions so then we’re not simply reacting without understanding how the structures of feelings actually operate in these

Cycles so thank you very [Applause] much panelist to come up maybe I can be at the end okay uh so uh I prepared a round of questions and no need to answer in a line feel free to answer as you wish uh so I think beginning with data as a starting point

Um I think just thinking about data research um as how it affects or contextualizes our discussion on historical narratives and preserved memories um at what extent do we depend on the saying that data does not lie or does it is there an element of manipulation that is problematic in the

Research use of data or is it always still useful as a basis of origin in research well I think that that’s a really important question about does data lie and I think my my immediate response and it was it was like getting this question I was like my immediate

Response was it’s not that data lies data just doesn’t tell you the whole truth and that as by not by by really understanding that data is a truth it is not the truth but then the power of data isn’t when it’s there by itself but then in combination towards Stories the

Narrative the feelings that you move from the idea of fear to resolve and I think that this is really I think part of the limitation funny enough as a person who does teach data in his classes I also talk about the limitations of that because what we do

Know is that if data truly mattered in life we wouldn’t have climate change no one would smoke and my cholesterol level would be 20 points down but that only two out of those three things need to change to save the world and I’ll let you choose what those two things are but

That it’s very much to understand that data needs context data is discourse data isn’t the end data isn’t the end where you drop the mic and then walk out the room but it needs to begin the conversation and I think that by understanding and connecting those the

Pieces of data to context its strengths and its limitations that you really see data in its full power because I think the other side the technocratic dependence on data just being data really fails the idea that we’re human beings and that by failing the fact that we’re human beings

I think in so many issues that we just say oh it’s just in the data that you missed the possib abilities of action the ideas of empowerment and I and and and really actually making things change in University I started off in science I was in physics and so I

Learned a little bit about the scientific method although that’s actually for um especially other applications and the scientific method um you you you test out theories right you you postulate something and you look for the data to support your theory and that’s really great when you’re trying to figure out a drug that

Will solve a migraine but then you figure out oh it becomes Botox later but the the thing with data is it’s so malleable and it depends on how you find it and what you’re looking for and then what you do with it as an artist uh information data it’s there to be

Researched and for what end uh from my perspective it’s to to interpret and I’m looking for um an alternative to the a dominant perspective of something look looking for um um you know the obverse or the underside of things and physics they always look for the missing Factor

You try to find all this information around something you know and you figure out what’s in the black box that was the big metaphor back then when I was a kid so as an artist I’m also kind of looking for the black box for a situation an

Approach to um a condition that I find fascinating and I don’t want to just regurgitate it but there’s something intriguing in this condition and you got to figure out what your stake in it is but the information what do you do with it when you well also what do you when

Do you know you have enough information to make a statement about it and the statement might not be uh so much of a declaration but it for me it’s more interesting when the statement is a new question or an alternative alternative that you can pose um for someone else to

Also continue asking so in that way you know you use this information to ask the question what other information is missing to make a more fulfilling picture um I think many of us are old enough to remember how uh Chinese medicine acupuncture practices and also Notions of chi you know of energy right

Was considered kind of superstitious mystical and in fact you know American kind of policy was to say no this is just Superstition it’s quackery um but things like Chi is something you know is still not understood it’s not really and in some ways I think as a person who’s brought

Up in a Chinese Cultural context and maybe having seen the impacts of chi as a energy field and how it can be transmitted across different bodies uh if one is a martial arts practitioner for example he begins to feel the impact of chi when a room full of people are

Kind of doing something together and so there are areas that we still in a western kind of measurement oriented framework still don’t quite acknowledge and understand but may be understood within other cultural context and we can just talk about many different cultures this way and Frameworks of knowledge so

I guess that’s really important to kind of maybe offer as an example of the limits of any one system to understand and how that often times that those limits can often times be weaponized in a colonial context um the other quick comment I’ll make which is a recommendation there’s a really a

Brilliant historian Anthropologist who recently passed away by the name of um Michelle roof truo uh who is really looking the the book book that I’m thinking of is called the silencing of the past um Power and the production of history and in that volume you can basically kind of boil

Down the key point is that facts or data exist they can exist and be used separately but they generally exist within the context of an assembly of other data so the Census records are actually a good example of that any one census uh you know kind of uh year in

Which things were taken in which the the definition of who counts as Oriental black white is constantly morphing but if there’s consistency or even inconsistency within that data set it is a data set and it becomes an authoritative data set so there’s an assembly of these bits and pieces that

Are gathered from door-to-door surveys and they become an archive so there’s facts an archive and then there are story so what are the stories that are told of that 10year data collection and there’s stories that are used in policy there are stories saying that oh there are way too many Chinese they’re

Dangerous these are the dangerous things that they’re doing whatever the story may be there’s a story that begins to emerge that Al often times affects policy and then the other fourth element is really then there’s a history which often times means that the the historian will Marshall the facts the archive the

Stories and that becomes really the capital age history but there’s also questions of how counter histories can begin to happen and in fact there are many cultures and many race cultures that have their own kind of facts data stories and their own histories but those histories are generally they don’t

Have enough phds right there there aren’t people who get that PhD and then write that book in the official Academic Press that’s acceptable or the official Journal that’s acceptable to have a greater Valance to begin to compete with the other kinds of more official narratives that are out there

So I guess I would you know just say more or less the same thing but there’s a way to understand how these things operate systemically but I think it’s in general the artist and the poet who often times are the ones who begin to question out

Of the box the logic and um and uh weigh the significance of how these nor heavily normative systems of Storytelling operate and begin to kind of open them up uh second question is about um another kind of universal entrance into what we’re all talking about uh which is

Food so Henry’s book and you talked about it a little bit um centers upon the historical memory and use of food as a gateway to the Past um and um maybe can we talk a little bit about food in all of your own research or perhaps a memories relationships that trigger this

Inspiration um and maybe we can give some food examples because some of us haven’t had dinner and it’s kind of nice to talk about food when we’re hungry well I mean as a newly as a new professor at SFU I couldn’t believe I actually got my food in the city class

Just passed by the academic Senate and it goes under the basic idea that behind every dish there’s a story and that behind every dish that by understanding food it actually gives you an insight into a city it gives you insight into a community it gives you insight into a

Neighborhood and that it is very one of perhaps very few kind of universal interfaces through which we have the ability to connect and I feel like that is I think why food in one way has kind of emerged into I think a topic that really can come join and connect people

I think that it’s also one that is challenged because of I think really the really the ongoing crisis in terms of the cost of living right now that there is I think food security issues food security concerns and yet at the same time it is also I think the ability to

Kind of connect communities together to pull them together in towards selective action it’s it’s interesting Henry in your uh talk like uh the what you do um with explaining in the context of the of white Riot um what would you do if you were a white person before going out to

Riot what would you eat if you were a Chinese person what would you what would you eat and somehow it’s like putting people into different perspectives historically through the lens of food that I think is is just really kind of an interesting way to do it it really

Struck me yeah thanks I I’d just like to say that um it was it would have been historically inaccurate for um the white riers to eat roast beef um before the riot because um it was a Saturday night not Sunday only a Sunday Sunday L lunch

Yeah um but the food the the the decisions for those types of food based on conversations that I had the research was basically asking people U I looked for old people uh from different cultures it was easier to find um Venus uh from Banquets and they’d be in

English so they’d be for they’d be primarily uh French influenced and exotic game and that kind of stuff uh but I couldn’t find any um um paper uh documents of what the Chinese were reading or the Japanese around 19 7 or Punjabi or indigenous but okay so the

Decision were basically made along lines of class so who had more money who had more power who had access to more expensive ingredients for the Chinese they were generally really poor and kanji is a way to spread out what little rice you have uh people in

Poor areas will eat kanji and and uh but you know it was spiced up a little bit with some pork which is very Chinese um and then the chef decided throw in corn which would not have been common at all um corn was to be fed to the pigs right

Um although different from the kind of corn we get nowadays is really sweet U the other really poor um kind of demographic was H South Asian especially the mill workers who were tending to eat like most people would eat more or less the same thing every day except they

Might have a special day on the weekend um on their one day off and that that was dll lentils and um you know Nan or chapati uh the Japanese were better off uh there was more opportunities for them uh they were supported by Japan Rising Nation politically

Economically uh and and um just before okay this is jumping later just before internment 1942 U there were I think over 40 sweets shops around the pal Street area that’s a lot and whoever got to eat candy when they’re a kid growing up poor you get it

Once or twice a year and that’d be it right but there was enough wealth within the Japanese Canadian Community to support desserts that’s amazing yeah for the whites uh yeah it was roast beef which back then would have been expensive it’s more expensive now relatively speaking uh Yorkshire pudding and um horseradish

Which would have been you know the the you’d Splurge for that for for a nice Sunday meal if you could afford it uh for the indigenous folks it was salmon and uh you know they’d be depending on salmon it didn’t really change that much uh but uh yeah the the chef kind of

Spruced that up too and put in uh uh pickled Spruce tips and Spruce tips would not have been fancy like they are now uh which are used by mixologist for $18 cocktails but back then you know know you just pull them off the uh um uh

The trees in May right when they first come out and and you just have them as little PL snacks so yeah I so I thought about reflecting the CL uh sort of like General class divisions through the food as well yeah it’s really great Jack did

You have um yeah more anecdotes but I’ve also taught of course on global noodles and when I was at NYU you could just hop on a Subway and get to any burrow in the the city so that my students W which are kind of half asian and half non

Asian um were grappling with really the Norms that they grew up with and therefore how noodles and um and you know unleavened bread could be a vehicle to kind of encounter the historical context and differences with maybe the Norms that being Cantonese or being Jewish or being Italian might have

Emerged you know and how did their Notions of what was normal for being an Italian wasn’t even normal for being an Italian you know in terms of the practices um but I’ll just kind of tell an anecdote to reinforce what Andy was saying in terms of the potential of food

To bring people together but also the potential of food to kind of notice uh norms and the limits of norms and cultural differences so um I have a my partner is not Asian she’s not Chinese and her one of the Early times that we got together with a meal with

Her mother uh who loves Seafood we ordered a whole Chinese flounder and um some of you may have experienced this but so she was really happy and delighted to see this whole fish and so she starts as the Elder to you know going around the Lazy Susan and

She takes she basically Cuts I would say a third to a half of the whole flounder and puts it on her plate right and you know those of you who are giggling would know that oh my God this is like so rude right I this is like the St you know how

Could one person take all that and put it on their own plate but in some ways it betrays the difference between let’s say having porridge or or Dow and sharing that right and if you don’t have enough you add more water you add you know a little bit more so that everybody

Gets to share it which is a a very social way of eating versus having individual portions in which that whole piece of meat is yours and nobody should touch it and the vegetables is yours and nobody should touch that and the other you know carbohydrated is yours so the

Ways in which his cultures and Old World cultures were linked but then how they modernized right and then the difference of how people think of themselves as individuals with their own individual portion that they have possession of it’s theirs right versus sharing it and if you only have so much you only have

So much right you share the limits of that or within a hierarchy within a patriarchal family you know the father gets the first round and gets more and the kids have to ask permission to get seconds you know so all those Dynamics are really interesting and how they

Indicate something about the culture and the politics and the hierarchies that that exist would have loved to take your global noodles course what’s that would have loved to take your Global noodles course too well you know it it happen I mean it can happen here because I think you have enough I’m taking

Notes but I mean you need a diverse enough you know po so you can then have students go to uh basically retrace the Silk Road in which noodles go across um tell the history of by having them go to certain kinds of restaurants that are in the far outreaches of um

Sheep head Bay for example which they can get um kind of Central Asian Foods right Central Asian noodles and see how dumplings for example transform in that process so it’s tough to do it in nework we can’t do it where I am now um but you

Can probably do it here um but you need a Subway to get around easily and uh kind of go to the far reaches in which you get that one mom and pop store that can do that kind of noodle that isn’t part of the normal you know kind

Of uh wanton you know chopi type menu right so so interesting um I think I I’m going to open it up to the audience uh because we’re kind of running a little bit late um questions uh from the audience may need some help um one in the back to the

Right hi thank you um I’m Crystal I’m a journalist and I write on uh I guess like Chinese diaspora in North America um I guess my question is for Jack thank you for talking about the like making the I guess drawing the comparisons between Annihilation um the movie but also like

The kind of political the historical propaganda earlier um I’m wondering about like the China man kind of octopus uh Chinese becomes the machine kind of thing um I guess I’m wondering how you might whether you could speak on how that resonates still today I know that

You talked about it in terms of the context of like chip makers and like China China Tech but could you speak on it a bit further in terms of maybe the rise of Tik Tok Sheen kind of the um controversy around that as well yeah did everybody get to hear that question um

Yeah okay um you know there there are Asian-American Scholars who are starting to write what is called Tech about techno orientalism so I would encourage people to kind of look at that but even early on in some of the early Pope fiction that existed um you know between World War I

And World War III um um there’s already this kind of prefiguring of the Oriental uh in that sci-fi as being um not having emotions and that was preceded in the 19 century by really how some of the uh anti-asian laws were played out um there are medical theories for

Example that um Chinese were able to labor as long as hard as they would in the US context and therefore there were it was unfair competition to the white workers because their nerve endings were further away from the surface of the skin right um so you get these kinds of

Logics that are supposedly describing the different laboring conditions or different orientations that people had there wasn’t a sense that these Chinese are fully human and therefore but there are different things things driving them or different things they felt responsible for or different social relationships they had you know so those

Kinds of contexts and human kinds of ways of understanding cultural difference differences and cultural you know similarities tended to kind of be morph into biological differences or somehow their wiring uh with Pulp Fiction their wiring was different they were kind of like human machines who who who didn’t have motions when you first

Started getting um a lot of the young Asian musicians starting to make it in in American culture us culture I’m sorry to say American culture but us culture for example because that’s what I know and you’d start seeing them playing in New York uh City at Major venues um

Whether they’re Korean Americans or whatever these prodigies some of the early critics were saying well they played technically EX extremely well but they had no emotion in their ability now there may be some truth to that it’s hard to say but there’s a pattern there in terms of kind of representing the

Oriental other as being really more mechanical very good with dexterity making chips you know there’s also the argument that Asian women were perfect for making computer chips because they had such delicate hands and they had that you know and um so these these kinds of arguments are often times made

Uh in direct connection and sometimes they’re offered as a as in all forms of orientalism not simply as a negative thing but somehow it’s meant to be a compliment somehow they’re capable they’re wired for that and they can do things that white people can’t do you know um so it’s a more complicated

Dynamic than simply saying oh they’re evil um but it’s also a feeling of threat and a feeling of unfair competition and a feeling that somehow they’re going to surpass pass us and we don’t have a chance um so it’s kind of like the White Men Can’t Jump you know

Kind of phenomena with other groups you know so right so there are these dynamics that are embedded I think so much in the culture that they’re very intersectional and they kind of always speak to whether the white man can maintain the position or are they constantly threatened and we’ve seen

That happen over different times it’s not just now but during after the Civil War when reconstruction was passed there’s a great fear that you know blacks being elected having the having the right to vote and being elected were going to overwhelm you know so WD Griffith you know did Birth of a Nation

With that kind of fear and Peril in mind and the sense of loss of what was going to happen to the white superiority which is why the KKK really emerged at that time in in a different way so I hope I hope that addresses building on this really I think an interesting question

Here about race and memory and and Technology I I I think a really interesting one and this is one I would put to Melissa because I think that this is an interesting question I have to you and I know the minister of responsible I think for for culture is here that

Really I I think one of the interesting things I think has happened in terms of the BC Museum the I think you know the the kind of dynamics that have happened in what we remember how we remember it and I think for me as a teenager going

To the BC Museum as everybody who goes go to high school in Vancouver goes to the great field trip to the BC Museum that I think one of the powerful and and and artifacts that’s actually in the BC museum is well what’s called the iron and that is a machine that was

Taken from one of the I guess it must have been a fishery it’s the Fisheries Museum Fisher Museum yeah it’s it’s it’s still there still there and then what do you do like how do you inh habit that physicality of a machine and yet the kind of inan racism that occurred there

And do you hold it up do you put it into the Holdings into the basement of a museum what do you do in those instances because in one way one can perhaps you know move it and put it down you kind of already see my bias is that or do you

Put it forward and you talk about this and yet at the same time where it lies where we are today and how would you deal with the iron yeah well so it’s interesting you ask or use that example because that the museum in Richmond that houses that um it’s become

More and more of a complex problem because of the demographics of Richmond Richmond in Vancouver is predominantly Chinese um and literally 50% Chinese 50 only really straight on Chinese and then the the sizable chinesee uh Japanese Community um and and and and the sizable but I mean it’s almost 75% Asian so so

Actually the museum reached out to us the Chinese Canadian Museum and asked us this specific issue and asked us to assist them on on how to address this issue at for school groups for tours and in a way you know if we didn’t exist the Chinese Canadian Museum

There was a sense like who would they ask it’s everything is kind of hyper you know politicized and for them to understand who to ask or where to ask it’s complicated um and they are a museum that’s predominantly non-chinese so it was it was helpful that we existed

In the context of being able to create this situation where we could advise them not that we are in any way experts on how to deal with these these um you know systemic racist histories or how to contextualize but at least we can help right and so I think that that was that

In the end is something that we exist to do and to also evolve and help in in the community I’ll just say a quick anecdote so we were I was working on a core exhibit for the Museum of Chinese in America and I went online I was curious and I

Found the a piece of a Northwest uh iron shink machine you know kind of machine so I was able to order it online and and get that’s a heck of an eBay kind of request there and and it was really because people were so embarrassed they didn’t know what to do

With it so they dissembled it and I was able to buy a part of it right um but that’s typical of a lot of what’s going on in which there there’s so much racist memor so-called memorabilia but really aspects of the past and the industrial past and how so many figures and you

Know kinds of racial imagery we’re we’re really part of the commodity Marketplace that um people don’t know what to do with this and how do you and this includes monuments as well right what do you do with it and most people would tend to think well we just have to get

Rid of it and hide it but then how do you actually reckon and grapple with it um maybe you need to put it somewhere else but you know how do you reckon and grapple with these questions yeah uh another question from the audience yeah I just had a a quick

Question maybe to start with Andy or anyone who wants to jump in but uh this question of how we capture data today what are the blind spots that you see you know someone from the future looking back at us now what is it that we’re missing you know as someone who’s

Dealing with data sets capturing these places what can you maybe read in into the the present I love this question because it was the third question I didn’t ask so luckily am asked it well I mean my my immediate responses as with many of my responses begins in

90s hip hop right and it’s the idea that you check yourself before you wreck yourself and that really within this idea and I think that this is the positive elements of how we changed that you we look at the ideas that you know history may not repeat itself but it

Perhaps Rhymes but yet at the same time you have the possibilities of change of Reform and I think that with what’s happening I think particularly in the provincial environment in terms of what’s going on with addressing systemic racism as well as dealing with how stats can now has active outreaches to measurements to

Ensure that there is a representation to of of groups that there is I think this deeper interrogation of data categories and how data is collected I think that we’re not perfect we are still missing some sizable challenges towards uh socioeconomic data Health Data but yet I think we are slowly moving together and

That part of this is it isn’t the idea that data is des Destiny but that data is dialogue and that di dialogue does not end it is one that you consistently go back and forth to make sure that you you have a transparency and accountability to your data and your

Data collection through which gets you closer to a truth I’m curious about one of the slides you put up earlier which is the um the province of British Columbia with some of the letters missing u i I got one of those letters in the mail um I

Don’t know who might have gotten one of those but I think I was included in a list um I think it was a randomized survey instrument by stats can sorry um BC stats um and it’s a particular initiative by by by by BC stats in in

Order to I think start a work on I think a sizable initiative trying to fill in gaps for data but doesn’t it come out of a specific anti-racist initiative in part also so is it actually like randomized across the entire Province or is it certain people people they figure

Are informed enough to have some kind of opinion as opposed of reaction perhaps or misinformed perspective oh no no no these stats would have randomized this completely randomized it’s it’s intended to be randomiz otherwise it wouldn’t be a Sur it wouldn’t be a surve it’s it’s a little bit alarming thinking about um

Um uh a general kind of perspective um on on um um I guess sort of like um eth well representation I suppose um so yeah I haven’t looked into it but I so curious about it well actually it’s funny this is how Jack is part of my origin story that as Jack is

Part of my origin story The the prequel if you will that um it’s actually when I was in New York I was working for the sensus information center for the Asian-American Federation and it was specifically created to ensure that V various communities across the US would feel empowered feel a sense of

Participation in the census that the idea is the census is for the commons that it is helped to inform the distribution of the commons the development of the commons and that that is the Again One Step it’s not it’s of of a very long journey through which

Data plays a part of understanding the community the nation that you are yeah I think the sort of one of the challenges that um I think um U we’re all kind of like being asked to address when we fill out these forms um around self-identification is what you choose

How you choose to identify yourself and especially for a growing kind of a demographic of people who have U more than one cultural racial um ethnic identity um sometimes they just choose to use one of them or sometimes they’ll choose more but uh they might omit some

And plus there’s the fact that a lot of us don’t know right so what we’re getting is just in some ways an opinion or a position about yourself uh for big brother or whatever it is right or however you perceive who is who is gathering this information so so to go

Back to your point to your question M it’s like well is this really data and according to Jack yeah it’s a data set but what is that information can we is it actually what’s the question you’re trying to answer and that’s basically what you’re like every data set it’s

It’s asking well what’s the question you’re trying to answer as opposed to here’s the data go for it and I think that that’s of course one of the biggest challenges in data work because you don’t begin with a data you begin with a question and then you begin to

Interrogate that data set and then look at what it can answer and what it can’t and I think that that is I think part of the kind of ideas of data literacy and and that there is this terrible history of big brother but then at Le but then

There’s also this belief that data can inform decisions that it can be another marker of Truth in towards informing a decision and data can empower hopefully also data can Empower but it can sure as heck harm I mean my my my my supervisor UCLA he helped do the initial research

Of how the US Census was used to incarcerate the Japanese American population that they they systematically broke Article 13 and which was the secrecy the secrecy uh element of the census to uh to incar to incarcerate the Japanese American population and I mean the interesting question was did it

Happen here in Canada and I think that there is certainly this Sinister element of data systems but then of course in the era that we are entering that this is something that is just going to erupt even further because you think about the idea of data and

Surveillance that even in the 1930s the that there’s a uh there’s a there’s a part in in in in the Thompson book that talks about the Deep desire of white racists in British Columbia wanting to use the census as a surveillance system for all Chinese Canadians that to to to

Ensure that you you knew exactly how many were living where in in the 1930s mind you which isn’t the era we live in now with AI with the internet with all those elements of data that it presents a sizable challenge towards not the society what happened in the past but

What we are into the future so so just to kind of um also ask about your slideshow so there’s one thing was that that that uh Graphic Bar graphic showing Vancouver as having the greatest uh Asian population and in some ways that just kind of emotionally May confirm for

People who are xenophobic to say well you know and maybe this is said all the time I don’t know in Vancouver that Asians have taken over Chinese have taken over that’s one one kind of observation that many people could make without necessarily understanding why um the other one is really about the heavy

Emphasis now that’s being placed on um part of the problem with China is the way they’re using facial recognition and surveillance um so if if you wouldn’t mind maybe just kind of respond a little bit to them because I think there are certain kinds of strong stories that are now being told

That reinforc and I I think it’s part of this question as well right indeed and and and how how are those stories um all those stories are told who gets to tell the stories how are we informing those stories and I think for me it’s

Having that bar graph is a means of just understanding how the society we’ve become that it’s a it’s a measure of really how much Metro Vancouver has changed and in one way the kind of opportunities the kind of new formations that we have in a place like Metropolitan Vancouver that we don’t

Necessarily see in other places and yet at the same time it I think opens I think opportunities and ideas and yet at the and and and but it also I think gives a sense of a certain accountability so I think that that this it’s it’s I guess the simple answer is

It’s complicated but yet I think it’s one of those elements to kind of have it’s almost like art in a way that a person can this two people can look at a single piece of art and have two totally different Impressions and I go ask the artists on this panel how do you

Navigate through that because now we’re literally talking about the art of data and how you can have one data set one bar chart and have an audience as vast and diverse and Incredibly educated I have no doubt here and yet have a incredible spectrum of interpretations of Impressions and how you get those

Interpretations of impressions to a singular action or if even that’s possible um that depends on the who gets access to that information and what they want to do with it it’s going to reflect their values right so yeah that’s all I have to say so we want to continue all

Of this but maybe we could continue it over canipes and wine and coffee and tea we have um a small reception for everyone who is welcome to talk more to the panelists um on the second floor uh you will have to go up to the third

Floor and then come down to the second floor to go to this wonderful reception um I’d like to thank um all the speakers and thank Henry in particular for organizing this and also thank am for the introduction and also for the wonderful space thank you all um audience members for coming and

Listening to us tonight too okay